Yet another newbie

["Steen Rabol" <rabol get2net dk>]

Hello all of you.

This mail is NOT ment to start a flame, but a cry for help !!

Recently I started using Linux - RedHat 5.2 ( 3 months ago ), and after a
'few' problems I think I have it under 'control'.

First I struggled to install GNOME 0.30 from the CD and after many hours I
gave up, gapped me a copy of KDE and after 15-20 minutes KDE was installed
and I was connected to the internet.
I like KDE, but as I said, I'm a newbie so when I saw that there was a
Danish user group in my area I joined it, and all was talking about GNOME so
I decided to give it a second try, I gapped the latest RPMS 0.99.3 ( the
whole directory ) and was trying to follow the 'getting started' from
www.gnome.org  step by step.

The first stop was when I should install libPropList I could NOT find a RPM
which included the libPropList - later I found that I had to download and
compile it - no problem but it was not mentioned on the step-by-step page.

The next problem occurred when I came to the point where I should install
gnome-admin, as before, it was missing !
I found 0.30 on the RedHat CD and installed it - well tried to It failed to
install due to dependency errors so I did a rpm -ivh --force

Due to various dependency errors I did a rpm -ivh --force *.rpm

Next step was to configure my system to use GNOME, and according to the
config page it should be easy -  well yes if one knows Linux it might be,
but I don't know Linux that much so I ended up with that I should
edit/create .xinitrc and here is how it looks:

panel &
background-properties --init &
screensaver-properties --init &
mouse-properties --init &
exec enlightenment &
exec gnome-session

This seems to work, but I don't know if it's the best way to start GNOME ??

Once again, the step-by-step have misleading information: according to the
page, one should add /opt/gnome/bin to the path, well I have /opt as a mount
point, but the RPMS is NOT installed there !

The performance is a bit slow on my machine (K6 200 MHz - 128MB RAM), I hope
that it is due to incorrect configuration of GNOME ??!!??

As I'm sending this mail I'm downloading the latest source, and hope to
compile it using the gcc supplied with RedHat 5.2 ( 2.7.2.3 - I think)

And as the fast ones can see I had to switch to my old NT to write this mail
as I can't make GNOME connect to the internet.


So _please_ someone tell me what I'm missing/doing wrong.

Thanks in advance.

Best
Steen